California's new online voter registration system is a huge success.  In the one month the system was available just before the November 2012 election, more than 839,000 people registered online, an increase of about 5 percent.

A new study by the UC Berkeley Center for Latino Policy Research reveals that online registration attracted a much broader pool of new registrants than predicted.    

Before the new system launched in September 2012, the conventional wisdom was that the new online registrants would be younger and more affluent, because there is more online activity among those groups.

Not so.  An analysis of the data in two counties (one red, one blue) shows that the new registrants mirrored the general voting population in ethnicity.   What's more, residents in lower income census tracts took advantage of the online registration system as much as higher income voters.  In fact, majorities of the white and Latino online registrants were low or middle income.

Another lesson in the dangers of conventional wisdom and the importance of research in getting it right.

Here's the story by Josh Richman.